Also in Tuesday morning’s news round-up: Osama Bin Laden raid pic Seal Team Six is a big Nat Geo hit; Cate Blanchett heads to Middle East jury duty; And Imodgen Poots eyes a Zac Efron romantic comedy.
Stars Campaign For Barack Obama at Election Finale
Jay-Z, Natalie Portman, Anne Hathaway, Eva Longoria, Maggie and Jake Gyllenhaal, Jon Hamm and Jennifer Westfeldt, Chris Rock, Samuel L. Jackson and many other stars have been lending their support to President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, Yahoo and US report.
Anheuser-Busch Not So Thrilled By Flight
“Anheuser-Busch InBev, maker of Budweiser, has asked Paramount to remove the beer from its hit film Flight, which centers on an alcoholic pilot who guzzles alcohol and takes drugs both before and after he prevents a malfunctioning jetliner from crashing,” THR reports.
Seal Team Six Lures 2.7M to Nat Geo
The number gave the National Geographic Channel its top broadcast of the year. The Weinstein Company backed project recalls the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden, Deadline reports.
Cate Blanchett To Head Dubai Film Festival Jury
She will head the jury that will pick the winner of the Dubai International Film Festival’s IWC Schaffhausen Filmmaker script award, which carries a $100K cash prize. The award, which began earlier this year, is intended to help the winning filmmaker transfer their vision to the screen. IWC Schaffhausen is a Swiss watchmaker, THR reports.
Imogen Poots Eyes Are We Officially Dating?
She will star opposite Zac Efron in the romantic comedy about three male friends in New York who make a pact to stay single as each of them begin to fall in love. The project is being sold at the American Film Market, currently underway, Deadline reports.
Fallout from Hurricane Sandy may have kept some crowds away from theaters over the weekend, but that did not stop Disney animated feature Wreck-It Ralph from packing a wallop at the box office. Box office in the top 12 headed northward to $124.6 million, 20 per cent higher than the previous week.
1. Wreck-It Ralph
Gross: $49,038,712
Screens: 3,752 (PSA: $13,070)
Week: 1
The Disney animation had a terrific bow, cashing in on great reviews and a solid marketing campaign. The feature also made $12 million internationally, making the title Disney’s top animated pic The $49 million plus domestic total compares to $40.1 million for Chicken Little in 2005. The opening compares to Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted, which brought in over $60 million when it opened in June. But Ralph helped bring up an overall box office which eclipsed the previous weekend.
2. Flight
Gross: $24,900,566
Screens: 1,884 (PSA: $13,217)
Week: 1
Flight cruised with strong results in its opening weekend, even edging out the weekend’s number one box office winner, Wreck-It Ralph in terms of per screen average. The results were stronger than expected and shows Denzel Washington, who is tipped to be a force this Awards Season due to his performance, is an audience draw. This is Washington’s fifth best debut.
3. Argo
Gross: $10,209,103 (Cume: $75,860,240)
Screens: 2,774 (PSA: $3,680)
Week: 4 (Change: – 16%)
The Ben Affleck-directed feature in which he also stars is continuing to show very solid momentum now one month into its theatrical life. Word-of-mouth is propelling the feature’s box office prowess and it will likely hit the $100 million mark in the next few weeks.
4. The Man With the Iron Fists
Gross: $7,910,980
Screens: 1,868 (PSA: $4,235)
Week: 1
The gross is…
Full Story »Flight, the first non-motion-capture feature Cast Away and Forrest Gump filmmaker Robert Zemeckis has directed in over a decade, is the kind of movie that, people like to bemoan, the industry doesn’t make anymore. It’s a solid, burnished work made about adults for adults and anchored by Denzel Washington in a role that calls for some classic star gravitas. It’s a mainstream film, but a consciously meaningful one, occupying that increasingly perilous mid-budget middle ground in a world continually drifting toward the opposing poles of massive blockbusters and scrappy indies. There’s not a superhero in sight and not a trace of nuance either — it’s the straightforward drama of a man forced by circumstances out of his control to confront the destructive way he’s been living his life.
That Flight turns out to be a disappointingly standard addiction story in its second half also serves as a reminder that Hollywood tends to be more invested in these types of self-serious movies than most actual audiences. In its need to reach a smug, by-the-book end goal of redemption and recovery, the film sheds much of the life and complexity it shows in the beginning, devolving from a morally ambiguous story to a story all about its moral.
Based on a screenplay by John Gatins (Real Steel), Flight’s opening sequences are a dazzling display of studio filmmaking at its limber heights. The camera follows Captain Whip Whitaker (Washington) out of a night-long bender and through the start of what should be a quick, routine Orlando to Atlanta flight. Halfway through, however, the plane malfunctions and things go wrong with terrifying rapidity. In the wake of the crash, friends and family mourn the lost while the press and public clamor for someone to blame, and we learn that Whip may be a…
Full Story »Disney’s 2011 family adventure Mars Needs Moms wasn’t just a box office disappointment; it was a box office disaster, one of the worst in movie history. Mars producer Robert Zemeckis, appearing at the Philadelphia Film Fest with his latest Oscar-hopeful, Flight, prefers to remember Mars Needs Moms another way: “It’s the best 3-D movie since Avatar.”
Zemeckis’s bold answer matched the bold question that prompted his trip down memory lane during Flight’s post-screening Q&A session on Saturday night. Following a string of massive career hits ranging from the Back to the Future franchise to Oscar juggernaut Forrest Gump, the Zemeckis-produced Mars Needs Moms opened last year as the filmmaker’s most high profile critical and commercial failure.
ImageMovers Digital, the Zemeckis-founded CG house that produced Mars as well as his own films The Polar Express, Beowulf, and A Christmas Carol, was shut down after completing Mars, while plans to embark on a Yellow Submarine pic with Disney were also scrapped; needless to say, it’s probably not Zemeckis’s favorite topic of conversation. (For what it’s worth, Flight, Zemeckis’s Denzel Washington-starring return to live-action film, played well with the Philly crowd.)
But one Philadelphia Film Fest attendee was eager for answers. Film critic Martin Schneider penned a reasonably questioning if snarky review of Mars Needs Moms at the time of release, criticizing the film for a slew of offenses ranging from its animation to character development, with particular scrutiny of the film’s “anti-gay,” anti-progressive gender messaging. He seized the opportunity during the Philadelphia Film Fest closing night film event to share how offended he was by the film, asking Zemeckis to explain: What happened?
For his part, Zemeckis didn’t flinch. Prior…
Full Story »Disney’s 2011 family adventure Mars Needs Moms wasn’t just a box office disappointment; it was a box office disaster, one of the worst in movie history. Mars producer Robert Zemeckis, appearing at the Philadelphia Film Fest with his latest Oscar-hopeful, Flight, prefers to remember Mars Needs Moms another way: “It’s the best 3-D movie since Avatar.”
Zemeckis’s bold answer matched the bold question that prompted his trip down memory lane during Flight’s post-screening Q&A session on Saturday night. Following a string of massive career hits ranging from the Back to the Future franchise to Oscar juggernaut Forrest Gump, the Zemeckis-produced Mars Needs Moms opened last year as the filmmaker’s most high profile critical and commercial failure.
ImageMovers Digital, the Zemeckis-founded CG house that produced Mars as well as his own films The Polar Express, Beowulf, and A Christmas Carol, was shut down after completing Mars, while plans to embark on a Yellow Submarine pic with Disney were also scrapped; needless to say, it’s probably not Zemeckis’s favorite topic of conversation. (For what it’s worth, Flight, Zemeckis’s Denzel Washington-starring return to live-action film, played well with the Philly crowd.)
But one Philadelphia Film Fest attendee was eager for answers. Film critic Martin Schneider penned a reasonably questioning if snarky review of Mars Needs Moms at the time of release, criticizing the film for a slew of offenses ranging from its animation to character development, with particular scrutiny of the film’s “anti-gay,” anti-progressive gender messaging. He seized the opportunity during the Philadelphia Film Fest closing night film event to share how offended he was by the film, asking Zemeckis to explain: What happened?
For his part, Zemeckis didn’t flinch. Prior…
Full Story »That’s right, Denzel Washington is such a gentleman he gave his actress wife Pauletta the spotlight on the red carpet for Flight, which closed out the 50th Annual New York Film Festival. Getting an answer from the celebrity couple was more difficult than getting an on-time flight out of Newark Liberty International Airport, thanks to a scheduling snafu that got Washington and his wife onto the red carpet late. This led what’s known in the business as a soundbite stampede from the media who’d gathered at Lincoln Center in Manhattan.
Check out the video below as Robert Zemeckis, John Goodman, screenwriter John Gatins and other guests shed some (F)light on one of the more mysterious films of the year.
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This is a case of life imitating art, or maybe just both going full circle. An Italian man took a cue from the 2002 Steven Spielberg film Catch Me if You Can starring Leonardo DiCaprio and donned a pilot’s uniform, fake identification and gained access to at least one flight in a cockpit. Apparently the age of intense airport security failed to initially discover the faux-pilot, who posed under the pseudonym of “Andrea Sirlo” before being arrested at a bar in Turin Airport.
In Catch Me if You Can, DiCaprio played U.S. con-man Frank Abagnale, Jr. who, among many things, flew more than a million miles on over 250 fights to 26 countries in the 1950s after he gained access to a Pan Am uniform and forged a pilot’s license. Abagnale, of course, pulled off the feat at a time when air travel was still in its infancy and security detail at airports during the time were significantly lax compared to today’s post-9/11 era.
“I saw that film and I wanted to be like Frank Abagnale,” the Italian man known as “Sirlo” told police, according to The Guardian. Police were first tipped off after a civil aviation lieutenant told police he had met a man who described himself as a captain, but appeared too young to be a pilot. He had apparently created an I.D. with Germany’s Lufthansa Airlines and flew on at least one flight operated by Air Dolomiti from Munich to Turin as a third pilot. Dolomiti is owned by Lufthansa.
The suspect created Facebook and Twitter profiles and several photos show him in uniform and sunglasses posing in front of aircraft. Following his arrest Friday, officials found more fake I.D. cards, uniforms, training manuals, and an…
Full Story »
Robert Zemeckis’ Flight starring Denzel Washington will screen as the Centerpiece of the Austin Film Festival & Conference. The 2012 event, taking place October 18 – 25 revealed some details of its upcoming event Tuesday including 10 films that will join this year’s lineup. AFF annually hosts over 180 film screenings and events, while the Conference welcomes over 100 speakers in its panels and roundtables. Among the films screened during the festival are numerous world and US premieres in a wide range of genres, from comedy to documentary, horror to drama. Also on tap for this year, X-Files creator Chris Carter will receive the event’s Outstanding Television Writer Award at AFF’s annual Awards Luncheon on Saturday, October 22nd.
Carter will join Paul Feig and Brian Helgeland as part of AFF’s new “Guest Programmer” section of the festival, giving “highly regarded filmmakers” the chance to screen and discuss films they found influential. Carter will also participate in – fittingly – “A Conversation with Chris Carter,” where he will share stories from his long career in television and film. Carter will also present special retrospective screenings of The X-Files and Millennium episodes. There are also plans to screen an X-Files marathon at the Alamo Drafthouse.
AFF will release the rest of its lineup in September.
Details of AFF’s early 10 films follow with details provided by the festival:
Flight – Centerpiece Film
Writer: John Gatins
Director: Robert Zemeckis
In this action-packed mystery thriller, Academy Award winner Denzel Washington stars as Whip Whitaker, a seasoned airline pilot who miraculously crash-lands his plane after a mid-air catastrophe, saving nearly every soul on board. After the crash, Whip is hailed as a hero, but as more is learned, more questions than answers arise as to who or what was really at fault,…
The world premiere of Robert Zemeckis’s Flight will close the 50th anniversary edition of the New York Film Festival, organizers said Thursday. The action-packed thriller stars Oscar-winner Denzel Washington as Whip Whitaker, a veteran airline pilot who crash lands his plane following a mid-air catastrophe, saving nearly everyone on board.
Though he’s hailed as a hero immediately after the incident, the legal, oral and ethical areas of his behavior before and immediately after become more ambiguous that initially portrayed to the public. John Goodman, Don Cheadle, Melissa Leo, Bruce Greenwood and Kelly Reilly also star in Flight, which Paramount Pictures will release in theaters November 2nd.
“Robert Zemeckis has shown his diversity as a storyteller in comedies, dramas and has skillfully translated narratives into specific effect environments,” Rose Kuo, executive director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center said in a statement. “It is a pleasure to see him bring to life his complicated, tragic-comic portrait of a man in crisis, with an exceptional and poignant performance by Denzel Washington.”
NYFF’s selection committee includes Richard Peña, the event’s long-serving chair who will retire later this year. Also on the committee are Melissa Anderson, contributor to the Village Voice, Scott Foundas, Associate Program Director, Todd McCarthy, chief film critic at The Hollywood Reporter and Amy Taubin, contributor at Film Comment and Sight and Sound
The 17-day New York Film Festival annually spotlights the latest in world cinema from both celebrated auteurs and new talent. The Film Society of Lincoln Center hosts the annually anticipated New York film event, taking place this year September 28 – October 14.
Having replaced one-time star Jessica Chastain in the Princess Diana biopic Caught in Flight, Naomi Watts was photographed on the set of the now-filming project, and the resemblance is… uncanny. Maybe it’s just the layered period blonde perm or the boxy sensible suit ‘n’ tights, but Watts looks to have slid quite fittingly into the skin of the late Princess of Wales, who embarks on a torrid love affair with Pakistani-born heart surgeon Dr. Hasnat Khan (played by LOST’s Naveen Andrews) in the ’90s-set drama.
The film (directed by Downfall’s Oliver Hirshbiegel) depicts Princess Di and Khan’s secret two-year relationship, which ended just months before her tragic death in 1997. According to previous reports, Diana “is shown as a damaged person who stalks the doctor after he ends the affair.” Fun. Can’t wait!
